Fröbel joined with Comenius in demanding that women shall take a responsible part in the education of the child. Mr. James L. Hughes[51] says in this connection: “The greatest step made toward the full recognition of woman’s individuality and responsibility since the time of Christ was made when Fröbel founded his kindergartens and made women educators outside the home—educators by profession. This momentous reform gave the first great impetus to the movement in favor of women’s freedom, and provided for the general advance of humanity to a higher plane by giving childhood more considerate, more sympathetic, and more stimulating teachers.” Fröbel was convinced that women were better adapted than men for the early stages of instruction. He says: “All agree that, compared with the true mother, the formal educator is but a bungler. But she must become conscious of her own aim, and must learn intelligently the means to reach it. She can no longer afford to squander or neglect the earliest years of her child. As the world grows older, we become richer in knowledge and art. But childhood remains short as before.” In other important particulars Fröbel owed much to Comenius, as well as to Pestalozzi. Compare, for example, the _School of infancy_ with the aims of the kindergarten, and the bequests of the Moravian reformer will at once be apparent. The exaggerated and unpedagogic symbolism, however, with which Fröbel burdened his otherwise excellent kindergarten system, formed no part of his heritage from Comenius. _Herbart_ Professor De Garmo,[52] who has given us a most succinct statement of Herbart’s educational views, remarks, “that one of the main results of Comenius, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi is the firmly fixed conviction that observation, or the use of the senses, and, in general, the consideration of simple concrete facts in every field of knowledge, is the sure foundation upon which all right elementary education rests. This truth is now the acknowledged starting-point of all scientific methods of teaching. Yet the fact of importance of observation in instruction does not carry with it any information showing how the knowledge so obtained can be utilized, or what its nature, time, amount, and order of presentation should be. In short, it does not show how mental assimilation can best take place, or how the resulting acquisitions can be made most efficiently to influence the emotional and volitional sides of our nature. Perception is, indeed, the first stage of cognition, but its equally important correlative is apperception and assimilation. It is Herbart and his successors who have made us distinctly conscious of this fact.” There can be no reasonable doubt but that Herbart did give a powerful impulse to the judicious assimilation of acquired sense-experience; and yet even here it is quite possible to underestimate the character and value of the nature studies of Comenius and the object lessons of Pestalozzi.